Think back to your first few years of teaching. If you’re like most educators, you probably made your share of mistakes. To be sure, we all do things differently now than we did when we were first starting out. Thank goodness for that!
When Faculty Focus put out a call for articles for this special report on teaching mistakes, we really didn’t know what to expect. Would faculty be willing to share their earlier missteps for all to see? Would the articles all talk about the same common mistakes, or would the range of mistakes discussed truly reflect the complexities of teaching today?
Think back to your first few years of teaching. If you’re like most educators, you probably ade your share of mistakes. To be sure, we all do things differently now than we did when we were first starting out. Thank goodness for that! When Faculty Focus put out a call for articles for this special report on teaching mistakes, we really didn’t know what to expect. Would faculty be willing to share their earlier missteps for all to see? Would the articles all talk about the same common mistakes, or would the range of
mistakes discussed truly reflect the complexities of teaching today?
We were delighted at the response, not only in terms of the number of instructors willing to share their stories with our readers, but by the variety of mistakes in the reflective essays. For example, in “You Like Me, You Really Like Me. When Kindness Becomes a Weakness,” Jolene Cunningham writes of her discovery that doing everything you can for your students is not
always the best policy.
In “If I Tell Them, They Will Learn,” Nancy Doiron-Maillet writes about her realization that it’s not enough to provide information to students if they don’t have opportunities to then apply what you are trying to teach them.
Other articles in Teaching Mistakes from the College Classroom include:
• When Expectations Collide
• Things My First Unhappy Student Taught Me
• Understanding My Role as Facilitator
• Don’t Assume a Student’s Previous Knowledge
• What Works in One Culture May Not Work in Another
We thank all the authors who shared their stories and know that the lessons learned will help
prevent others from making these same mistakes.
Mary Bart
Editor
Faculty Focus
Fostering Mentorship
When he was an undergraduate at Denison University in the 1980s, Fred Porcheddu would have told you that his professors were mentoring him. They saw him as a strong student who could follow in their footsteps, and they groomed him to join the professoriate.
Today, Mr. Porcheddu, who is an associate professor of English and chair of the department at his alma mater, sees mentorship differently. It’s something that should be available to all students, not just those at the top of the class. And its goal should be helping students along whatever path they choose, not nudging them into academe.
Conventional wisdom suggests that teaching students how to be creative is a task best left to the arts and design. But faculty members from other fields are increasingly seeing the benefits of cultivating in their students the kinds of integrative and lateral thinking that creativity can foster. Two examples from psychology came to us in response to our recent request for your thoughts on this topic.
An emerging priority in medical education is the need to facilitate learners’ acquisition of quality improvement (QI) competencies.
Accreditation bodies in both Canada and the United States have included QI and patient safety in their core competencies.
MONTREAL -- It’s not whether to talk to students about sensitive current events like the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va., but how. That was the upshot of a panel called “Teaching in Our Contemporary Moment” here Monday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
“You have to talk about those things in your class,” said Tanya Golash-Boza, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced, who specializes in race and immigration. “Whatever you think of sociologists, they’re more socially aware than the biologists and the computer scientists … You have to remember that sociology is a place where students come to talk about what happened yesterday, what happened last week.”
Our students live in an online world. They’re emotionally and physically attached to their devices and many of their relationships exist within technology. As educators, there are many ways that we have had to adapt to this changing landscape of communication within our teaching, and when I look around my institution, I think we’re doing a remarkable job at keeping up with the rapid pace of change.
The classroom is a non-stop hub of feedback: test grades, assignment scores, paper comments, peer review, individual conferences, nonverbal cues, and more. Feedback is essential for student learning.
Still, students’ ability to process and use feedback varies widely. We have some students who eagerly accept feedback or carefully apply rough draft comments, while many others dread or dismiss their professors’ notes or reject exam grades as “unfair.” Although feedback is integral to our classrooms and work spaces, we often forget to teach students how to manage it.
Instruction of team skills is quickly emerging as an important and missing dimension of engineering education. This project evaluated a new framework for guiding students in providing self- and peer assessments of their effectiveness in teamwork. This framework is the foundation for a new web-based tool that offers students structured feedback from teammates, along with personalized exercises and actionable strategies that guide targeted learning in the areas thereby identified. Specifically, the study documented in this report investigated whether the feedback framework, when used for intra-team self and peer feedback, increased students’ abilities to learn about and improve their team-effectiveness in executing design projects.
Most teachers enter the profession with strong ideals regarding the work they are about to undertake, and the impact
this work will have on the students they teach. A good number of those who apply to faculties of education will report
that teaching is something they have dreamed of doing since they were, themselves, young children. Others will tell
stories of teachers encountered throughout their own schooling – teachers who, through effective teaching strategies,
personal encouragement and modeling, influenced their decision to pursue a teaching career. Conversations
with teacher candidates entering their first years of professional life are, in many cases, full of hope, passion and the
expectation that, through their work as teachers, they will be able to inspire, excite, and make a similar impact on the
lives of the young people with whom they work.
Most teachers enter the profession with strong ideals regarding the work they are about to undertake, and the impact this work will have on the students they teach. A good number of those who apply to faculties of education will report that teaching is something they have dreamed of doing since they were, themselves, young children. Others will tell stories of teachers encountered throughout their own schooling – teachers who, through effective teaching strate- gies, personal encouragement and modeling, influenced their decision to pursue a teaching career. Conversations with teacher candidates entering their first years of professional life are, in many cases, full of hope, passion and the expectation that, through their work as teachers, they will be able to inspire, excite, and make a similar impact on the lives of the young people with whom they work.
Most teachers enter the profession with strong ideals regarding the work they are about to undertake, and the impact this work will have on the students they teach. A good number of those who apply to faculties of education will report that teaching is something they have dreamed of doing since they were, themselves, young children. Others will tell stories of teachers encountered throughout their own schooling – teachers who, through effective teaching strategies, personal encouragement and modeling, influenced their decision to pursue a teaching career. Conversations with teacher candidates entering their first years of professional life are, in many cases, full of hope, passion and the expectation that, through their work as teachers, they will be able to inspire, excite, and make a similar impact on the lives of the young people with whom they work.
Conversations with teachers who have spent some time in the profession often reflect a tempering of the high ideals with which they began their careers. While they are still hopeful about the work they are doing, there is a sense from many teachers that factors beyond their immediate control prevent them from fully realizing their original vision of what their professional life was going to be like. In short, there is often a noticeable difference between the teacher they aspire to be and the teacher that they feel they are required to be.
Teaching with Conscience in an Imperfect World: An Invitation, by William Ayers, is a recent addition to the Teachers College ress
Teaching for Social Justice series for which Ayers is an editor. The author takes readers on a philosophical, existential, and practical journey (a motif used throughout) to explore the nature of public education in the U.S. as it presently is and as he believes it ought to be in a democratic society. Although Ayers is a distinguished scholar of education, this is not a typical academic book. Arguments are not disguised in theory and references to scholars are reserved for those of significant stature
such as John Dewey, Maxine Greene, and Paulo Freire. The language used within the book is informally punctuated with
colloquialisms and slang such as pinheaded, queeroes, ginormous, and bits and pieces. Consequently, Ayers achieves broad appeal for those inside and outside of the academy.
If you’re interested in using technology tools to enhance your teaching, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the mountain of information out there. To make matters worse, much of it is either highly technical or simply not very practical for the college classroom.
Teaching with Technology: Tools and Strategies to Improve Student Learning approaches teaching technologies from your perspective — discussing what works, what doesn’t, and how to implement the best ideas in the best ways.
Teach on Purpose! Responsive Teaching for Student Success, written by Leslie David Burns and Stergios G. Botzakis, is an impassioned argument for the importance of using responsive teaching within today's and tomorrow’s K–12 schools. The authors and their guest teacher-authors provide a straightforward rationale that explains why teaching purposefully and responsively is not just an option, but fundamental to teaching well. They collectively do this in a way that is relevant, practical, timely, and sometimes even humorous.
It’s no breaking news that technology is here to stay. Among other things, this means that all schoolkids today, including your child, grandchild, niece and nephew, rely on their tech skills to excel at school. By the time they finish school, they will be required to implement a variety of tech skills on a daily basis at work.
As a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle you now have to teach your child a new skill: tech intelligence. And the worst part is that by their teens, your kids are likely to surpass your tech-savviness, so you have to do it as early as you can
The authors address three questions: (1) What are the foundational practices of team-based learning (TBL)? (2) What are the fundamental principles underlying TBL’s foundational practices? and (3) In what ways are TBL’s foundational practices similar to and/or different from the practices employed by problem-based learning (PBL) and cooperative learning (CL)? Most of the TBL vs. CL and PBL comparisons are organized in relation to the size of and strategies for forming groups/teams, the strategies for ensuring that students are familiar with the course content, the nature of the group/team assignments, the role of peer assessment, and the role of the instructor.
UBC’s “Moments that Matter” course mines departmental expertise to transform a second-year history course into a team performance.
The dull roar of plastic computer keys clicking in the lecture hall at the University of British Columbia stills for a moment as Canadian history professor Bradley Miller flashes a picture onto the screen behind him.
It’s former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, flamboyantly decked out in a cape, white jacket with a rose pinned to the lapel and a 19th-century dandy’s hat – an incongruous sight at that most high-testosterone of events, the Canadian Football League’s Grey Cup championship of 1970.
This article explores for a broad audience the changing landscape of education in the digital age, the changing roles of teachers in a technologyrich education system, and the skills, knowledge, values, and ways of thinking that teachers will need to have to support students’ social, emotional, and intellectual development in a digital learning environment.
This article reviews the developments in significant pedagogical and research domains in TESOL during the 50-year history of TESOL Quarterly. It situates these developments in the shift from a modernist to postmodern orientation in disciplinary discourses. The article also considers the changes in modes of knowledge dissemination in the journal by examining the changes in locations of research, author- ship, article genres, and research methods. While there is an evolving diversity in the disciplinary discourses of TESOL that can appear to be a threat to the field’s coherence, the article argues that this diver- sity can contribute to a more plural knowledge base and constructive disciplinary growth for TESOL.